Hey everyone! Tonight we'll be announcing our new decisions for the new SHL Expansion GMs! It will be scheduled for tonight on the SHL Youtube account at 7:30PM Eastern, I'll be talking about our two new picks and their locations, what the hiring process looked like, and what changes are coming to the SHL in the move from 18 to 20 teams, which will include playoff changes and divisional realignment! I'll stay on a bit to field some questions and update this post with everything that'll be talked about on stream, for those who can't make it.

We'll see you tonight at 7:30PM!




Hey guys, per the stream we have settled on our new Expansion GMs! This was a very involved process that saw a lot of great applications, so narrowing it down to our final 2 was tough, but we're very confident with the selections we landed on! For our first new Expansion team, the SHL Head Office is proud to announce...

Dankoa, the new GM of SHL's Montreal Expansion Team!

And for our second new Expansion team, we're also proud to announce...

Acsolap, the new GM of SHL's Philadelphia Expansion Team!

Big congratulations to both @dankoa and @Acsolap on bringing these two historic hockey cities to the SHL! Both Dank and Acso brought to the table a boatload of experience as General Managers at the SHL and SMJHL level, as well as some great applications and follow up interviews. As tough as this decision was to make, we're very confident with what these two will bring to the table! Stay tuned for a word from both of them in the future as they begin work on figuring out what the colours and branding for these locations will be.


Obviously with the move to 20 teams comes some shifting in the league in terms of how we map out the regular season, the playoff format, and what divisions look like. We talked about this in detail on the stream, and a lot of this is more theoretical as we're still mapping out the finer details on how this will look, but here's where our heads are at:

Divisional Realignment - We're figuring out what the specifics are here regarding how divisions will be laid out, but one thing we know for sure (and is pretty obvious) is that with 2 Eastern teams entering the league, leaving things as is creates an imbalance in the conferences. To balance this, the Chicago Syndicate will be moving to the Western Conference. This will hopefully balance out the conferences a little more as well, though we'll also see more of that it in next section...

Playoff Changes - We went back and forth on this quite a few times but after a lot of discussion, we decided the best play for the league is to move to a 16-Team Playoff Format. The reality is that the 12 team format sucks, it's really restrictive in terms of options, and we're stuck with it until FHM7 introduces new custom playoff options. Meanwhile, the 16-team format is full of customization options that don't force us to rely on something out of our control to fix the issues with the current format. With the move to 16 teams, the playoffs will be seeded in the following format:
- Top 3 in each of the 4 divisions will clinch a playoff berth, same as before.
- Each conference will have 2 wild card spots that ignore divisions, seeded as 7th and 8th based on whoever outside of the 6 divisional spots has the most points in the conference.
- Divisional winners will be seeded in their conference's bracket as 1st and 2nd.

We believe these changes will make a positive impact towards parity for the SHL, alongside old contracts being phased out and the coming season's update scale changes.



Once again a big congratulations to Dankoa and Acsolap! We're very excited about the future of the SHL, and we hope you are too!

On behalf of the SHL Head Office
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